The old woman gazed at the photo of her grandsons, standing in its silver frame on the scratched coffee table by the window. She remembered the day the toy sports car – minus one rubber wheel – had gouged its French-polished top.
Despite the damage, she had kept it as it was. Her grandson was horrified that it was still there to remind him.
It brought a smile that a maturing young man could feel that twinge of guilt, many years after the incident… as she also did, the old woman mused, so long after the other one; the one for which no-one was prepared.
Now, in his turn, the desk-scratcher was to be married. There was something about the coming ceremony that promised to make right the memory of the other, the older dark day.
Her brightly coloured dress was lit by a flash of spring sunlight breaking through the clouds. She followed it, and from where she was sitting, she could just see the tops of the trees swaying slightly; the last of the pink blossom being cast adrift and taken on the wind.
She reined in her thoughts. “Enough of the past,” she muttered, realising she had spoken the words; then, looking down, decided to finish the sentiment. “Let this be a joyful healing…”
The phone rang. She stared at its familiar Art Deco shape, thinking how the bell’s sound echoed the black Bakelite curves. She had insisted they keep it alive for her.
“Yes?” her practiced tones never wavered.
“The car is here, Ma’am,” said the precise voice.
She turned one last time to look at the photo of Diana and fought back a small tear.
“You would have been very proud of him,” she said into the silence of the royal study.
————-
(296 words, excluding the title)
This is my entry for the Bloggers Bash Blog Competition, 2018.
The theme is ‘Royalty’. The blog post may have a maximum of 300 words.
The Blogger’s Bash for 2018 is on the 19th May, the same day as the forthcoming royal wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. We wish them every happiness.
Original image of Bakelite phone: source.
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Of one mind?
by Steve Tanham
To be of ‘one mind’: it’s an expression we don’t hear a lot of, nowadays, though it remains available to us in the language. Historically, it was used to describe an intensity of opinion, or – even stronger – belief, that something was so important that several key figures united in a single ‘front’ of solidarity behind whatever was being endorsed.
Perhaps our vision of truth has become dulled, and it is considered that there are few such ‘black and white’ moments… In line with the complexity of our world, it may be that nothing truly ‘is’ anymore, there are just shades of ‘isness’.
Over the ages, philosophers have ventured into the waters of the human psyche and grappled with the idea of single-mindedness. To be of ‘sound mind’ has always been important; and that implies being single in our interior nature. That unity expressed by a group of people being of one mind now applies, at least within the world of psychology, to a healthy state for the individual.
But are we ‘single’ within ourselves?
For example, we can resolve, going to bed, that we are will rise early and finish off that important piece of writing for which we need a snappy ending. We may reinforce that intent by assuring ourselves that famous writers often speak of the inspiration and clarity of mind to be found when the night’s rest has cleansed the mind.
And then, tired, we fall asleep…
But do we get up that extra hour early to avail ourselves of what we know to be advantageous? Usually not, if my experience of human nature is correct, including my own. So, how can one ‘part’ of us have such a clear resolution of what we want and need to do, and another part (the tired bit) decide to ignore it. I am reminded of the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ tarot card in which various mythic beings are seen rotating to a point of ‘uprightness’, in what fits well with the idea that only one of them can have precedence at any one time, though they all belong to the notional ‘self’.
The Rider-Waite Wheel of Fortune card (source)
The key to examining this – as much as the mind can examine itself – is in the word ‘self’. We all consider that we have a self. It is our identity, a stable entity with a name and memories… and, a body, which, though constantly changing, gives us the sense of continuity of being. We can come to terms with biological ageing as long as we have an inviolate ‘self’ within this collection of cells.
And that’s where it gets a bit tricky…
We need to look at what we can count on: we have the memory of being a straight line of biological life through our ‘timeline’. We have a body that changes, and a name, but apart from that it could be argued that we are simply a point of perception that sustains an illusion that we have a single, undivided self, or mind or brain, call it what you will. Whatever name we use, we are very attached to it. Any lively debate between people beginning a study of the esoteric will throw up strong opinions, as the inviolate ‘self’ is encroached upon!
And yet…
And yet, that notion of the importance of being ‘single minded’ is deeply important to us; and that, like so much else that drives us, is based on a fear of it no longer existing… the reality of our existence suddenly ending. To counter this, we may postulate that there is a ‘heaven’ somewhere separate to life, perhaps where our kindnesses will be remembered and will outweigh our bad bits. The human psyche needs such edges or the fear might just become overwhelming. I do not mean to disparage religion, here. Religion helps many people to leave deeper and more self-less lives. I’m just examining the psychology of it all. If the idea of an eternal self is real, why is that which is considered ‘holy’ associated with the self-less, rather than the super-self?
Can we get closer to something ‘real’ by investigating how we might deepen this sense of a united self? Certainly, this has been the approach of many leading thinkers over the past two hundred years. They point out that the weakness of our personalities in holding to a true and single self is something we can examine, on a daily basis. The dispute comes, not in being able to study ourselves, but rather in terms of how we respond to what we can so easily find.
To make a study of ourselves we need to have a vantage point from which we can make these (initially hypothetical) observations. To create this interior space, we have to allocate it certain properties. The first of these is how we react. When we study our reactions we find that none are more powerful that the shock of seeing ourselves as we really are. When we find our constant contradictions to that ‘image of me’ that we carry around, we begin to wonder how we have lived a life that was so shallow in this respect. We can be objective about others, but when we turn that spotlight on ourselves… em.
This interior space, this ‘tower’, if you like, has to be a place in which only the truth is allowed. We can keep it secret, of course, so we don’t need to feel shame as we watch ourselves lying, for example. But, sooner or later, this internally honest viewing platform will begin to develop, for the want of a better word, its own interior feelings. One of them will be a quiet revelation that the truth has a profound power all of its own; and that it lights the way into a deeper state of real self that we had never even suspected was there…
It’s a gateway that we can only approach when we are truly ready… like the resolve that will get us up on a dark winter morning to finish that story…
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via low-cost supervised correspondence courses.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©Stephen Tanham, Silent Eye School of Consciousness.
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♣️
Cube and rum
Sophisticated fun
The night beyond
The story spun
♦️
A teasing touch
Don’t reach too much
And spoil the fun
Dangled, loved one
♠️
A shiver, a shudder
Still laughter down under
Nail follows bone
Taut flesh coming home
♥️
Recently bold
Softly nestle and hold
A different kiss shared
Bliss sought and bared
🍸
©Stephen Tanham
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Identified flying object
by Steve Tanham
One of the key understandings in mystical thought is the idea of identity. Words morph their meaning over time, and identity is a classic case.
We might think of the police knowing the ‘identity’ of a person they want to speak to. We would find it in fashion magazines for both genders in the context of a garment to reinforce our identity in line with a progressive trend.
Both these show how the word identity means either a unique description or a close bond through some sort of ‘mapping’ of properties by adoption. The central theme is that of a chosen closeness. If I buy a new car and feel very good when I drive it, I’m identifying with an object that adds to my identity and makes me feel good.
The car analogy is a good one – and a very good way of studying one of the 21st century’s fault lines – in the sense that, if ten miles down the road, someone deliberately races past our new sports car, we may well feel aggrieved that we have been deliberately ‘slighted’ and that our inflated identity, centred on the car, has been wounded.
At such times, if we could step back and imagine we were flying above our shiny new car and watching the whole drama unfold, we might be a little ashamed by how we chased after the errant teenager and nearly caused a crash by proving that our new vehicle was superior.
It’s easy to insert the word ‘ego’, here. We all know the difference between driving our shiny new car and the theoretical view from above it. In the latter we are detached because we can see a bigger picture. In the former we are somehow compressed into a smaller space where the red mist of anger is a frequent consequence.
Most drivers have had that ‘red mist’ moment; particularly men, with their overdoses of testosterone. Young male drivers have an horrific accident rate precisely because, after yearning to drive for years, they suddenly get wheels and have to prove to the world that they have always been a better driver than anyone else… or, at least, their mates.
When recalling full story of accidents of this nature, the accused often say they did not know what came over them; the red mist descended and they went to war. Going to war is a good link to what’s underneath of all this, and we go to war for our country – because it’s a primary part of our identity.
The path to self-knowledge begins with such constructs. When I see that my stupid reaction to the teenager overtaking me was a reduction in consciousness, despite the elation beforehand, I might begin to investigate how such identification is at the root of many of the negative things I do, and the cause of much of the energy loss that I might suffer on a daily basis.
This type of identification is inherited from lower levels of our evolution – but not too far back. In anything but an age of true plenty, the possession of objects of visible status was a sign of rank and personal worth. You were important if you had them. Modern advertising works very hard to keep this alive in our societies, and the cult of celebrity is an even worse example of how someone here today and gone tomorrow can be all but worshipped; as can everything they are seen to drive and wear…
When we have to add objects to our selves for that good feeling, we are showing that the self does not have enough worth. We want the object because it will signal to the world that ‘I’ have grown along some axis of importance. In this way we see that much of what we are taught, by education, by family and by employment, is based upon an inherited sense of worth that is not related to the unique and precious self with which we came into the world and this life. That self is taught that it can feel ‘bigger’ if it acquires ‘classy’ things. But such objects do not actually make us feel a lot better – In fact the gain is often way out of proportion to their true cost.
There is a paradox at work here, and the shock generated when this is seen can be, and should be, life-changing…
Here’s the first part of the shock: the things we use to define ourselves need not be physical objects at all. We can be attached to our likes and dislikes, our hatred, our politics, our favourite food… or even our suffering. Identification, seen from the most powerful height above that speeding car, is a label saying ‘this is me’. The flow of life’s events, over which we have little or no control constantly brings us up a filmstrip of images, smells, tastes and other sensations. This filmstrip was originally seen by us the infant as a passing show. We did not attach ourselves to its display until we became more conscious of the link between ‘me’ and that filmstrip. But, and here’s the key, we had to be taught that – by others whose lives were already bound up with the film. Once tied in this way, any change to what is being ‘viewed’ is capable of taking us into sadness, anger, hatred or a dozen other negative states.
The two perspectives are radically different: one is that life is happening; the other that life is happening to us.
To break free of this, whilst still retaining the hard-won discrimination of adulthood, is the work of mystical development, under whatever banner. To break the link with the filmstrip’s negative power we need to open up a space within ourselves and move into it, in the sense that, from then on, we watch both the filmstrip and our own reaction to it – without allowing identification to take place. We watch the flashy car, we register it as a quality thing, but we do not allow that habitual effect of ‘yes, that’s me’ or ‘I would be a better me if I had it’. We do this because we know the real value of an awakened Self.
To do this is to be at odds with the world, to a certain extent, though that can be viewed with humour, too. But in a time when the world appears to be on the edge of insanity, might not being at a slight angle to it be the saner option?
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via low-cost supervised correspondence courses.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©Stephen Tanham, Silent Eye School of Consciousness.
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On this day
A meagre seven years ago
I woke to find you gone
A day premature
Just the nursing angel in your hand
The phone receiver in mine
△
Now, at these times
I picture you in your old shop
Happy to leave your kitchen
For shop’s bell, whose call
To seek but not always to find
Mattered little, but sharing chat did
Then, happier, returning to your TV
△
On these days
I miss you most
The simple routine of your day
Grown golden in my mind
Only seven years ago
And a million miles away
△
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
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Come and join us?
At the heart of an ancient landscape is the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas. The village grew up around a Benedictine Abbey founded there over a thousand years ago and it is still a place where folklore, myth and legend come together…and few of them agree.
The holy spring rose from where St Augustine struck the ground… or where St Edwold saw a vision, depending on which story you prefer, just as the giant on the hillside dates from the Iron Age… or is a seventeenth century political statement. The mysteries here are real… but underpinning them all is the fact that the place was undeniably seen as sacred.
The name is interesting in itself in that respect; ‘Cerne’ is believed to come from a Celtic word for ‘stone’ and ‘Abbas’ is the Medieval Latin ‘abbot’, which means ‘father’. Does the name refer to the Abbey, or did the abbey…
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Crack.
The ruler slapped down on the desk, narrowly missing my knuckles and dissolving the magic.
“Daydreaming again? You will pay attention in my class, young lady!” The French mistress, determinedly optimistic to the last, turned her back and returned to the blackboard. Oddly enough, French was always one of my favourite subjects and one at which I did best… in spite of the daydreaming.
It was not the anxious, fretting kind of daydream, not was it just wandering attention. It was like stepping into a wardrobe and coming out the other side into a magical land where anything was possible.
I could daydream my way through most things and still take in, process and apply the information, and was always in the higher sets. I was lucky… back then, I only got into trouble for daydreaming. A few years later and I would probably have been sent to…
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The beautiful Northumberland village of Etal, one of a local twin, has a fine ruined castle; but this blog is not entirely about castles…
The picture above is the castle at Etal. It was constructed in the middle of the fourteenth century by Robert Manners, a Norman descendant. It consists of a residential tower in the ‘Pele’ style; a gatehouse and a corner tower of small proportions. The whole is protected by a curtain wall. The castle has a ‘bloody’ past, being close to Branxton, the nearest settlement to the site of the Battle of Flodden (September 1513), at which the English King Henry VIII’s forces under the Earl of Surrey prevailed, after a long and bloody battle, over those of James IV of Scotland.
A few days prior to the battle of Flodden, King James had stormed Etal castle and added it to the many others captured in the most audacious invasion of England ever undertaken by a Scottish army.
History judges the English King to be the primary aggressor, since the whole war was prompted by Henry tearing up the Treaty of Perpetual Peace which had previously been in place between the two countries, and with which the Scots were perfectly happy, since it recognised them as a nation.
James IV was killed at Flodden, which saw almost one-third of the 34,000 Scottish soldiers killed. Etal was a short-lived prize…
We have forgotten the emotional taste of ‘wholesale slaughter’. Like many words that are supposed to trigger a moral response, wholesale slaughter can now be rendered ‘over there’ by television. If the news is terrible we can change channel… the choice is ours. We think it’s an escape, but, really, it eats away at our collective soul… we feel we can do nothing, so we don’t try. We accept horror – real horror, as way of life. The cost is that we become farther from reality – and reality is true life…
Ten thousand Scottish men (and thousands of English soldiers, too). What does that number mean? If we asked them to come back from their dark, Northumbrian graves to help us understand this horror, and line up in rows of ten, how long would it take a firing squad to kill them again? Let’s assume that the modern firing squad uses machine guns that can kill ten men in a minute. It might take four more minutes to have them march to their positions and another five to clear the bodies away. That’s a rounded ten minutes per squad of dead men. To do this to ten thousand would take 10,000/10, which is a nice and easy one thousand minutes. There are sixty minutes in an hour, so the firing squad, with its modern automatic weapons, would be continuously active for nearly seventeen hours – most of a day, if you include the English soldiers too. Imagine being there, and watching all of it? We might get a new appreciation for ‘wholesale slaughter’, and this is a minor example…
Northumberland is full of castles. Castles and ‘Pele’ Towers: tall, fortified dwellings, less than luxurious, but safe – in which a besieged family could live for many months until help arrived. Wars, family and tribal conflicts helped create a very chequered past for this beautiful county, which holds the North East border with Scotland. When there weren’t wars between England and Scotland there were the reivers – bloodthirsty family gangs, ready to attack, plunder and kill in these historically un-policed borderlands.
Border reivers at Gilnockie Tower, from an original drawing by G. Cattermole (Wikipedia Public Domain)
The Roman emperor Hadrian had found it difficult, too. So difficult that he had ordered the construction of a wall that ran coast to coast, from the Solway Firth, near Carlisle to Wallsend, near Newcastle. It has been described as the greatest engineering feat of the Roman world, but, as is the case with walls, it didn’t really work.
A different approach and smaller than a wall is the idea of keeping people in… Being inclusive, looking after them. It’s an idea seemingly at odds with our go-getting, every man and woman for themselves, pursuit of excellence, kill the bastard, commercial world.
The reivers just killed their enemies; and were killed in return. Vendettas, feuds, usual cycles of endless violence. It makes good television and rotten societies.
Caring requires that we believe in Good. Not just as an idea but as a force, an ideal, a state to be drawn on when we are pressed or outnumbered or in despair. The people who established modern Etal believed in good. They twinned it and the neighbouring village of Ford together, establishing a ‘Model Village’. This is not to be confused with a miniature village. An model village was a term coined by entrepreneurs like Robert Owen (who wrote ‘A New View of Society‘) and William Hesketh Lever (founder of what became Lever Brothers – Today’s Unilever). It was place where, alongside work, decent housing and education were provided on the basis that, if you looked after people, you could expect them to look after that which employed them.
The village of Etal is beautiful and has a presence not entirely due to the castle.
The main street of Etal is clean and pretty, with a lovely Post Office cum tea room. Many of the buildings are thatched. This includes the Black Bull – centre in the picture above – the only thatched pub in Northumberland. The pub is being restored and is an example of what’s still very good about Etal and its nearby twin village of Ford. Nowadays, the twin villages are part of a managed country estate owned by the Joicey family. One striking thing about Etal and Ford is that no-one but the controlling family is allowed to own property. The houses, the shop and the Black Bull are only available to rent. Tenants are expected to look after their properties and everyone feels included. it’s a happy place and proud – you can feel it as you walk through on your way to the bloody castle.
About a half-hour’s drive away from Etal is the Bambrugh coast, a very beautiful place. We were staying a few miles away in a newly resurgent village with a great beach, and eating our evening meals in a local pub about a mile away, to which we walked, in the January darkness, enjoying the sound of the sea hitting the stone harbour in the inky darkness. Photography was well-nigh impossible but this shot illustrates the point I want to make:
It was only on our second journey back to our holiday cottage that I realised how dark the cove was – totally dark, in fact, apart from that one street lamp. The reason was simple: there was no-one living there. The most expensive properties in the village – facing the sea – were all empty on that week in January. They had been bought as holiday homes, busy during the summer, no doubt, but a dark and ominous shoreline in winter.
Etal is not the bustling village that the the poster below records it as being in 1820, but it’s not broken, either; not like that winter shoreline a few miles away.
Of that list, there remains a church, a post office/excellent tea room, some well-kept and lovely houses, a caring landlord that ensures that everything fits; and, oh yes….a ruined castle.
Inclusion is everything…
The thought brought to mind something I read on a plaque within the gardens of San Jose University, many years ago. I didn’t write it down at the time and had to struggle to remember the gist of it, but it went something like this:
He drew a circle to keep me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout
But love and I had a plan to win
We drew a circle to keep him in
It’s a lot better than a dark shoreline and empty houses, or a line of doomed people seventeen hours long condemned to die by the actions of a psychopath…
We think of our world as much bigger than villages. But the villages of our communities need not, ever, be broken. We just have to be inclusive…
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via low-cost supervised correspondence courses.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©Stephen Tanham, Silent Eye School of Consciousness.
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“I’m re-reading Tolkien,” said my son.
“Cool. How far have you got?”
“The riddles in the dark bit.” That made me smile, as we’d taken inspiration from that chapter for the December workshop.
“What do you reckon… when Gollum says ‘my precious’, is he talking to the ring or himself?”
“I asked myself the same question when I first heard that story.” Our teacher, Miss Bedford, had read The Hobbit to a class full of ten-year-olds, sitting silent and enrapt on the library floor. I remember quite vividly being struck by that anomaly, even then. “Both.”
“Hmm…” said my son, settling back with his morning tea. “Elaborate…”
The character of Gollum is a moral tale all on its own. Greed and desire cost him his home and his place amongst his people. He murders his best friend to obtain the ring and is driven to slink away invisible, into the…
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